On the First Anniversary of a Hate Crime

On Friday, January 20th, 2017, my husband was dragged off our front porch by three men celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 45th president of the United States. They were drunk and shouting in our front yard about how this country was theirs now, as if it somehow wasn’t before. When my husband asked them to take their revelry somewhere else, they tried to hurt him. Fortunately, he was able to defend himself, hitting one of them with a rock, and they ran away.

In the immediate aftermath, I was a wreck. Although I wasn’t home at the time of the attack, that didn’t stop me from replaying the scene as relayed by my husband over in my mind. I would find myself cooking dinner and burning the garlic as I stared out the window over the rooftops of our small New England town. I barely left the bed. When I tried to go for a walk and change my surroundings, I got as far as the stoop, where the scene played out once more in my mind. I started avoiding friends and people I knew. I wanted them to know, but I couldn’t find the words. I obsessed over phrasing and inflection, not sure if what happened counted as a hate crime, and not wanting to diminish or exaggerate events. Not knowing if I wanted pity, sympathy, or anger, it was easier to just stay home.

At the same time, my husband seemed perfectly fine, even happy. He was unafraid to walk home from work in the dark. He went out with friends and fell asleep quickly. At first I thought he was acting strong to mask his fear, but after a few days I had to admit that I seemed to be suffering far worse than the victim of the attack. When I asked him about this, he seemed surprised.

“Maybe I feel okay because I could fight back,” he said. “It was kind of empowering.”

I understand this. He got to bash back in self-defense, lash out with just cause. We’ve talked before about our different experiences as gay men. He is a few years older than me, and while his family has always loved and accepted him, he grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts, where being gay had to be regularly defended. Meanwhile, I spent the first 20 years of my life as a woman before coming out as a transgender man, at which point Barack Obama was beginning his second term in 2012. My parents took out loans to put me through college, while my husband worked his way through community college and then turned to playing music professionally to support himself. Our different class backgrounds show up frequently in our relationship—I often walk by homeless people feeling guilty, while he always stops to talk and gives money if he has it, and I had to introduce him to the concept of a vacation. When I was adjuncting and we attended university functions together at Smith College or the University of Massachusetts, I know he felt uncomfortable and out of place — but I never expected this difference to provide him such a unique advantage in the time of Trump. His familiarity with violence, however hard won, has made him better-prepared for the years ahead than I am.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there were close to 900 reported hate crimes in the ten days following Donald Trump’s election, many of which involved attackers shouting the president elect’s name. Recently, the FBI released data showing that hate crimes have been on the rise in the U.S. since Trump’s campaign took off in 2016. The xenophobic rhetoric of Trump and his cabinet have empowered others, especially poor whites, to blame people of color, Muslims, immigrants, queer people, or anyone visibly different, for their daily struggles. Anti-Muslim violence in particular has risen precipitously, skyrocketing past the last highest year on record, 2001. It is a trend that has also been seen in the U.K. and Western Europe as the far-right capitalizes on the insecurity and anxiety in their austerity-ridden constituencies to spread a fear of “foreignness” as their platform.

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I sometimes wonder if my husband’s experience counts as a hate crime. My husband identifies as genderqueer, but we are both white, able-bodied, and generally able to pass as cisgender men in public. Even if that’s not a box either of us actively enjoys being placed in, it comes with certain privileges, like not being attacked or shouted at in public because of what we look like (at least when we’re not holding hands). As visibly white men, we are afforded safety and the benefit of the doubt wherever we go in our small town, even if on the inside our hearts are pounding as we walk past fraternity row, and we never know if that “faggot” was casual invective or meant to hurt us.

I worried that I may be causing the most harm without having thrown any of the punches.

For many victims, this constant doubting and second-guessing about the motivations of the attackers — do they curse us because we’re different or are they just poorly-adjusted? — is the source of many crimes that could be categorized as driven by hate, but that go unreported instead. Others may stay silent out of fear of reprisals. But ProPublica did an in depth analysis of the FBI’s data and showed that even when hate crimes do get reported as such, police departments often fail to follow through on procedures to enter such incidents into the FBI’s national database. Often, responding officers may categorize an incident, whether vandalism or violence, as being driven by hatred for a particular group, only to have that judgment reversed by a second opinion further up the chain of command. There are lots of these second opinions, it seems, who fail to see hate where it originally existed.

The bigger question to me is what they would even do with these numbers if they were accurate. Would they use the figures as leverage to promote legislation that props up systems of surveillance and incarceration? Or is it just to keep tabs on how many of us are hurting? To let us know that we aren’t alone, even though it very much feels like it?

My husband, a person who gets misty-eyed during commercials and is grateful for the darkness in the theater that allows them to ugly-cry when watching a Pixar movie, denied feeling scared or traumatized by the attack with a nonchalance that betrayed no doubts. He described seeing a kind of hollowness in his attackers’ eyes, like they were going through the motions but didn’t really believe what they were saying and doing. I failed to see how this changed anything — they still went through with it — but he said he thought that this lack of conviction was why they ran off when he showed signs of strength. I wasn’t sure if this made me feel better or worse. Should I pray for bullies with weak constitutions? Shouldn’t we be even more concerned that the rise of Trump has brought people out of the woodwork who think the litmus test for patriotism is a willingness to hurt those who are different?

A "hate crime" implies that vitriol comes from one direction only, that it’s easy to tell the difference between victim and aggressor, hate and love. But it’s not always easy to know where hurt is coming from, and the intentions behind it. It’s clear to me that my husband was justified in casting the first stone, if not the first blow, in self-defense against his attackers. This seems cut and dried. But by asking for more vulnerability in the face of danger, I knew I was asking him to reopen wounds that have long since scarred over. I worried that I may be causing the most harm without having thrown any of the punches.

Not all wounds are meant to provoke emotion, I know this; some are just meant to hurt.

Asking another person to feel may require a wounding. We build up our defenses against the rest of the world, not letting people in, to the point where inflicting pain may be the only way to find a chink in the emotional armor we carry around day after day. The root of the word harm, after all, comes from the Germanic harmr, meaning grief and sorrow. I see this most clearly when I talk about the attack with friends and colleagues, who usually respond with some variation of how my news makes them feel "saddened" "ill" or "enraged." I can’t help feeling guilty when I hear these words; as if just by bringing it up I’m injuring them, too.

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But if asking someone to feel something requires inflicting pain, then this raises the question: in attacking my husband on inauguration day, what were his attackers asking my husband to feel? Only fear? Maybe pity? Sorrow? Rage? Or was this a wounding less poetic. Not all wounds are meant to provoke emotion, I know this; some are just meant to hurt.

I also know there are ways we live now that feel infected. The shouts of young men outside of our house make my jaw clench and my pulse quicken, regardless of whether they contain generic homophobic slurs used as slang (they often do). We avoid eye contact and walk quickly past the rows of chipped-paint, ramshackle homes that have been resigned to their destructive tenants: beer pong tables in the front yard, picket fences askew and missing slats like teeth. We talk about leaving Massachusetts for somewhere new, cheaper, somewhere without these memories. When chatting with friends and family about possible futures in locations that don’t involve a coast, it takes all my willpower not to shout at their doubting, uncertain looks IT HAPPENS HERE, TOO. The looks don’t come from my friends of color, my Muslim friends, but only from white family members or those who grew up in Massachusetts, those who think of New England and New York as bastions of sanity and kindness. There is hate everywhere, I want to say to them, you just don’t notice because it isn’t directed at you. What difference does it make where we go?

In the hours following the attack I considered going to the police, but decided against it. I’d only called the police once before in our small town. We were moving out of our apartment because the rental agency had leased the bottom two floors to college-aged boys who partied at all hours of the night and day, whose violence and loudness and casual homophobia left me feeling jangled in a way I hadn’t experienced before. The day of our move my husband had to work, so I returned alone to our apartment at 5am on Sunday morning to fill the U-Haul. Our door was ajar, and inside a man was asleep in our wingback chair. I freaked. I shouted at him to leave, to get out of our apartment, but he didn’t move, didn’t register anything I was saying. I marched downstairs and shouted at the college boys until they came upstairs and retrieved him. The college boys were white with thick Boston accents, but the man in my apartment was black with dreadlocks, and it was clear they didn’t know him. He didn’t seem to know where he was, but he left when they told him to leave, wandering around our yard for awhile. I was afraid; I could hear the college boys making fun of me downstairs for being afraid. The way I was raised, we called the cops when we were afraid. I called the cops.

On the phone they asked me to describe the man, but when the white officer got there I rescinded my description, I said didn’t know what race he was. He looked at me skeptically — How could you be so stupid? he was thinking, or maybe, Why are you letting your white guilt control this situation? — and returned to his cruiser, but not before suggesting that I had left the door open in that house where I was always on edge, that there didn’t seem to be any signs of forced entry, that I was complicit. I didn’t know how to say I was more afraid of the boys still in the house, the ones who were supposed to be there. I felt safe and guilty while his car idled outside, the college boys gone silent for at least a little while, no sign of the man who had been in our apartment. Then he left, and I packed quickly.

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Calling the police requires statements of blame that are too definite, too confident in their rightness. In this anniversary of Donald Trump’s inauguration and my husband’s attack, I am feeling more assured that I want no part of this national pastime of assigning blame. Our commander-in-chief is the king of this; he is never to blame, it is always someone else’s fault. And sure, I could do that — point to my husband’s attackers and say “this was a hate crime, these men are responsible for our suffering,” place one hand over my heart and abdicate all personal culpability for how the label "hate crime" plays right into the hands of our prison-industrial complex, how it only serves to provide more evidence of the need for walls to keep people in, or out, or locked away from their emotions.

But the calculations involved in blame and hate are far more complicated for me. There are ways in which myself and those I love have been victimized, but I still have failures to own up to, imperfections, ways in which I play to the hand of power, or have failed to show up where I’m needed. Others may feel the need to report it, and I sincerely hope they get the result they’re looking for. But it’s not a system I have confidence in, not one I want to strengthen, even though I don’t know where that leaves me.

Callum Angus writes and lives in Western Massachusetts. His essays and stories can be found in The Common, The Millions, BuzzFeed, and at calangus.com. He was a Lambda Literary Fellow in 2017, and is at work on a novel.

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